Facing still more of the same - 10 years after 9/11

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Facing still more of the same

Behind The Headlines By Bunn Nagara

Ten years after 9/11, little has actually changed, least of all political attitudes.

UNTIL Sept 10, 2001, the world seemed a simpler place.
Image by Walt Jabsco via Flickr
Terrorism was a scourge that needed to be kept in check, if not eliminated while Afghanistan was a tribal wasteland in the boondocks and the legendary graveyard of foreign empires.

Iraq was an oil-rich autocracy and established US ally against Iran but with a tendency to slip into unilateral nationalist fervour, and the United States was a neo-conservative right-wing Republican bastion huffing and puffing for something to blow at.

The next day, two planes slammed into the two towers of New York’s World Trade Center. Neither bad coincidence nor pilot error was ever an issue.

Other aircraft had been hijacked the same day, but the twin crashes at the twin towers were more dramatic and dominated headlines, sound bites, political posturing and public imagination.

As the heart of lower Manhattan seemed to dissolve in a rising mound of smoke and dust, more than just debris was in the air. It was a time of change for the US and certain parts of the world.

Suddenly, the United States had the national tendency to slip into unilateralist fervour, Afghanistan and Iraq became targets that needed to be kept in check if not eliminated, and terrorism, oil-rich autocracies and Muslim states came to be profiled as one from many a Washington desk.

The neo-conservative right-wing bastion in the White House had found a couple of things to huff and puff at. Such was its enthusiasm that it forgot how Afghanistan remained very much a graveyard of foreign empires.

The result now, a full decade later, is described in Washington circles and elsewhere as the worst US policy overreaction of the century.



Within weeks, the George W. Bush administration blamed the attacks on Osama bin Laden and his followers, collectively called “al-Qaeda” as the Arabic translation of “the base,” the name the CIA originally gave Osama’s group and training camp. Nobody had claimed responsibility for the New York attacks, and al-Qaeda soon after denied any involvement.

The Taliban government in Afghanistan was then accused of sheltering al-Qaeda, so that made it fair game for elimination. In late 2001, Afghanistan’s Taliban leaders were ousted and replaced by the Pashtun activist and CIA point man Hamid Karzai.

The Zionist neo-cons in Washington were on a roll, “regime change” was the name of the game, and they were about to aim that exuberance and momentum at another target. But for the purpose to hit home, some points still needed to be made at home.

So Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was to be the new Hitler, he trashed his country’s wealth on costly palaces, he killed many people (decades ago), and he endangered the world or at least Israel with many nasty ABC (atomic, biological, chemical) weapons.

The problem was getting enough voters in the US and the general public in ally countries to go along with the idea. Bush and his British counterpart Tony Blair then decided the latter reason was the most persuasive: that Saddam had dangerous “weapons of mass destruction” (WMDs).

This was despite UN weapons inspectors having found no Iraqi WMDs, a recent major feature in Newsweek magazine coming round to the same conclusion, and the story about secret sourcing of radioactive material for a bomb discovered as fake. What mattered more instrumentally, however, was whether the UN Security Council could be massaged into endorsing a US invasion of Iraq.

It could, China’s abstention notwithstanding. As plans for an invasion of Iraq were being drafted, the US public also needed convincing.

So there was the ruse that Saddam was linked to al-Qaeda, and al-Qaeda was responsible for all the nasty things. Meanwhile Osama, having found that such issues could really rile the world’s sole superpower, “admitted” that he was responsible for the policy panic in Washington.

Thus Saddam was eliminated and replaced by a US ally, although the vast quantities of high-grade Iraqi oil seemed more elusive. But the violence and instability in Iraq also meant China could not access the oil either.

Still, the casualty rates in terms of human lives, economic cost and national destruction and degradation continue to mount. Ten years on and with the follies rather more exposed, senior US and British officials have queued to disown any responsibility for the continuing debacle.

Errors of judgment

Early this month, former head of British intelligence service MI5, Lady Eliza Manningham-Buller, gave a BBC lecture to enumerate the multiple errors of judgment across the Atlantic at the time. Critics replied that she should have said so then, since it is now too late.

Former British foreign minister Jack Straw pleaded innocence through ignorance, saying that the Blair government at the time had been misinformed by allies, including the US. As justice minister later, Straw refused to apologise personally to an Algerian pilot whose career was ruined after Straw wrongly accused him of training a Sept 11 hijacker.

Former US vice-president Dick Cheney also released a biography focusing on that period, typically accusing others who disagreed with him at the time. Former US secretary of state and chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen Colin Powell swiftly blasted him for the effort.

Powell was followed by former US secretary of state and national security adviser Dr Condoleezza Rice, who also found Cheney small-minded and mistaken. Rice should be replying more fully in her own biography later this year, so her critics should in turn be prepared.

However, the whole point of being honest, truthful and accurate should be to acknowledge past mistakes and avoid new ones. With the military occupation of Afghanistan now set to extend beyond the promised deadline, and new occupations likely in Libya if not also Syria, avoiding mistakes is not going to be easy or even possible.

9/11 American Innocence: What Really Happened to Us?

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Frederick E. Allen, Forbes Staff

September 11 and American Innocence: What Really Happened to Us?

Evil expunged—but have we fully recovered? Image by swanksalot via Flickr

The other day at the Republican debate, Jon Huntsman said “I think we have had our innocence shattered” by what happened on September 11, 2001. On Morning Joe the journalist Tina Brown called the date “the last moment of American innocence,” and Mike Barnicle described it as “the end of our metaphorical summer as a country.”

Really? It seems as if every time disaster strikes our nation we hear that it’s the end of our innocence, but in truth there has never been an innocent time in the land of the Salem witch trials and the Boston Massacre and John Brown’s raid and our murderous Civil War and . . . well, the list goes on, right up through—not long before September 11—Monica Lewinsky and the impeachment of a president.

In fact, I’d say that if anything the opposite may be true, that a big price of September 11, beyond the lives lost, was that it may have given us a new birth of innocence, or perhaps of destructive pseudo-innocence.

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Of course we were completely blameless in the hideous tragedy that befell us. We were entirely innocent in that sense of the word. When the planes struck that morning, the U.S. was, and knew it was, a beacon of freedom. We also were a prosperous land where unfettered innovativeness had by and large made every generation richer than the last. We had shown that we could achieve more than anyone else even while balancing our budgets and cutting our deficits. We felt freer, tougher, stronger, and more resilient than anybody. Then we were attacked by an enemy that was as purely evil as an enemy can be. We had done nothing to deserve the horror visited on us. We were plainly guiltless in an attack that was plainly evil. Only the most extreme, reflexive guilt-seekers could possibly find any American transgression that could begin to rationalize the attacks.



Knowing ourselves as a shining force for good and as blameless victims in what happened on September 11, maybe we let it all go to our heads a little bit. A kind of national naivete seems to have swept over us, an innocence about the consequences of our actions. President Bush told us that we were now at war, but also that we would have to make no personal sacrifices. He launched two foreign wars with no tax increases to pay for them. After the start of one of those wars went well, he appeared, in a burst of overconfidence, on an aircraft carrier under a giant banner reading MISSION ACCOMPLISHED to announce that “In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.” Then as that battle continued, we even forgot that as a nation we had always held torture to be un-American and morally unjustifiable.

As our two new wars began to spin out of control we not only didn’t pay for them but also gave ourselves massive tax cuts and a big new unfunded Medicare entitlement at the same time. Too many of us kept buying bigger and bigger houses, and second homes, while borrowing all the money to do so, secure in our understanding that for Americans life keeps getting better and we all get richer. We cooked up reckless schemes to multiply the wealth from those homes. In other words, we appear to have forgotten, in the long shadow of September 11, that no big thing in life is easy or simple, and nothing comes without a price.

We finally began to see the price we were paying later in the decade, when the wars we had started refused to end, and the housing market crashed and bankrupted millions of Americans, and Wall Street imploded, and the economy went into its worst tailspin since the Great Depression. Finally our new age of innocence ended.

Or did it? In 2008 we rejected all our misdeeds of the previous years by voting for “hope” and “change” and giving ourselves a president who seemed to believe that any problem could be solved if everybody just agreed to be reasonable and get along. Then in 2010 we turned against that choice by electing a Congress dominated by people who seemed to believe that any problem could be solved by lowering taxes and shrinking government, period. If we had been naive through the decade of the 2000s, our naivete lived on, and it continued to get us into trouble.

If that all means that in some sense Osama Bin Laden provoked the U.S. into self-destructiveness, then in that sense he won the struggle he began on September 11. Yet the fact is that he has lost it. His poisonous cause has withered and died. The Arab world has turned definitively against him in the Arab Spring, as the rest of the world turned against him long before.

As for our own naivete, if that is what it was, maybe it is beginning to lift now, too. On September 8, 2011, that ineffectually conciliating president gave a speech presenting a raft of actions to address the ongoing jobs crisis—policies that had all won bipartisan support in the past—in which he repeatedly demanded that Congress “pass this jobs plan right away” and bluntly told the legislators to “stop the political circus.” And the leader of his opposition, the previously unyielding speaker of the House, actually said, “The proposals the president outlined tonight merit consideration.”

Might we finally be approaching the end of an age of innocence now?

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